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Workers at the Pennsylvania petrochemical plant where President Donald Trump spoke Tuesday were told that if they didn't attend the event, they either had to use paid time off or receive no pay for the day.At least some of the workers who attended the speech were instructed not to protest the President, who told the crowd of workers at the Royal Dutch Shell plant he would be imploring their union leaders to support his reelection. The instructions to the workers came in a memo, a copy of which was obtained by CNN's Polo Sandoval from a congressional source. That source was given the memo by a person in Beaver County, Pennsylvania -- the site of the plant."Your attendance is not mandatory. This will be considered an excused absence. However, those who are NOT in attendance will not receive overtime pay on Friday," read part of the memo.Shell spokesman Curtis Smith confirmed workers were told they would also miss out on some overtime pay if they skipped the event. Shell said it did not write the memo.The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, which first reported on the memo and the ultimatum to workers, reported one contractor forwarded the information to workers based on a memo Shell sent to union workers. Smith, the spokesman for Shell, said language in the memo relating to workers' conduct, such as not protesting, did not originate from language passed on by the company."It was understood some would choose not to attend the presidential visit and were given the option to take paid time off (PTO) instead. As with any workweek, if someone chooses to take PTO, they are not eligible to receive maximum overtime," Smith, the spokesman for Shell, told CNN.The Tuesday Trump speech was an official White House event -- not a speech sponsored by the reelection campaign. Trump told the audience at the plant Tuesday that they should oust their union leaders if they declined to support him. "I'm going to speak to some of your union leaders to say, 'I hope you're going to support Trump.' Okay?" Trump said. "And if they don't, vote them the hell out of office because they're not doing their job. It's true. It's true. Vote them out of office."The White House did not respond to a request for comment. Steamfitters Local 449, a union mentioned in the Post-Gazette, also did not respond to CNN's request for comment."This is just what Shell wanted to do, and we went along with it," Ken Broadbent, business manager for Steamfitters Local 449, told the newspaper.
"Wow, Report Just Out! Google manipulated from 2.6 million to 16 million votes for Hillary Clinton in 2016 Election! This was put out by a Clinton supporter, not a Trump Supporter! Google should be sued. My victory was even bigger than thought! @JudicialWatch," Trump wrote.He was referring to a study by psychologist Robert Epstein, which was discussed on Fox Business earlier on Monday.But Trump did not describe the research correctly. And the research itself has been called into question.Facts First: Epstein himself says Trump was wrong about his findings. Epstein did find "bias" in Google search results, but he says there is no evidence Google "manipulated" the results to favor Clinton. Also, critics of the study note that there is no definitive link between search results and voting behavior in presidential elections.First let's address what Epstein says Trump got wrong. Then we'll delve into Epstein's research.Trump's words and numbers were inaccurateEpstein, who testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee in July, found what he alleges was a pro-Clinton bias in Google's search results.In an interview with CNN on Monday, Epstein said the pro-Clinton bias was "sufficient to have shifted between 2.6 and 10.4 million votes" to Clinton.There is no basis in Epstein's research for Trump's claim that the alleged bias might have affected "16 million" votes. Epstein did testify in July that big tech companies in general could potentially shift "upwards of 15 million votes" in the 2020 election, but he didn't claim that this happened in 2016.In the Monday interview, Epstein rejected Trump's claim that Google "manipulated" votes in 2016. He said he does not have firm evidence even that Google intentionally manipulated its search algorithm or results, let alone votes themselves."I don't have any evidence that Google manipulated anything. I just have evidence that there was this bias -- highly statistically significantly bias," he said.Google said Epstein was incorrect in his claims of bias."This researcher's inaccurate claim has been debunked since it was made in 2016. As we stated then, we have never re-ranked or altered search results to manipulate political sentiment. Our goal is to always provide people with access to high quality, relevant information for their queries, without regard to political viewpoint," the company said in an email.(An aside: Judicial Watch, a conservative legal activist group that is active on elections issues, was not involved in Epstein's research. The group told CNN that it believed Trump tagged it in the tweet to encourage it to look into the allegations.)How Epstein determined there was biasEpstein is senior research psychologist at the American Institute for Behavioral Research and Technology and a former editor in chief of Psychology Today magazine. He said he voted for Clinton and is not a Trump supporter today.For this study, he had 95 people from 24 states, including 21 self-described undecided voters, conduct election-related searches using search engines Google, Yahoo and Bing. Then he had another group of Americans, hired through the crowdsourcing website Amazon Mechanical Turk, use a point scale to rate the supposed bias of the articles found on the first page of the search results.An extremely pro-Trump article would get a minus-5, while an extremely pro-Clinton article would get a plus-5.Using this method, he found that Google's results were reliably more pro-Clinton, in both red states and blue states, than Yahoo or Bing results. Then, using his previous research from elections in other countries about how search results can affect voter intentions, he came to a broad estimate of 2.6 million to 10.4 million votes potentially affected by search bias in the US in 2016.Epstein said he chose to publish his findings on the website Hacker Noon, not in a peer-reviewed journal.Epstein said he is "suspicious" that Google is deliberately biasing its results, given the Democratic leanings of its employees and the allegations of company "whistleblowers." But he said it is possible the bias comes from the company simply neglecting to fix an unintentionally flawed algorithm."I don't even care about the human element. There's a system out there running amok," he said.Criticism of the dataOther academics have joined Google in criticizing Epstein's methodology and conclusions.One issue is the quality of news sources.Google says one of its criteria for ranking news results is how authoritative a source is. Using Epstein's methodology, a search engine whose top results page did not feature an article from a far-right pro-Trump website, such as Breitbart, would be ranked as more biased in favor of Clinton than a search engine that did showcase Breitbart -- even if the first search engine highlighted a deeply informative Washington Post investigation about Trump's past and the second search engine highlighted Breitbart's pro-Trump puff piece.Epstein emphasized that he is not a Trump fan. But he argued that Google results should not be treating pro-Trump media as second-class "for whatever reason, whatever your excuse.""I've certainly met people that say Breitbart is a more reliable news source than the New York Times ... there's a lot of subjectivity that goes into these kinds of determinations," he said.Another issue, other academics say, is that Epstein's study did not establish a link between alleged bias in search results and voter behavior in 2016.Epstein said he came to the conclusion of bias sufficient to affect 2.6 million to 10.4 million votes based on what he has found in studies of national elections outside the US, including the 2010 Australian prime minister election and a 2014 Indian legislative election.In other words: Epstein did not test 2016 American voters to see if their Clinton-or-Trump choice had been changed by search results they got. He extrapolated from his previous studies.In an American presidential election, people tend to know so much about the two leading candidates, and are getting news from so many different sources, that it is not at all clear that search results would affect their preferences the same way they might in other settings where they have less information, said Michael McDonald, a political science professor and elections expert at the University of Florida.McDonald said it is certainly possible that political results from Google and other search engines have been affected by the unintentional biases of the people who wrote their algorithms. But McDonald said Epstein has failed to establish that any such biases have had anywhere near the magnitude of impact on American presidential voting that Epstein suggests."It's just not plausible," McDonald said.Ramesh Srinivasan, a professor of information studies at University of California, Los Angeles, and author of the forthcoming book "Beyond the Valley," said Epstein's analysis did not take into account how much a voter might care about a particular subject.For example, a strongly anti-abortion voter might be more likely to have their vote affected by abortion-related search results than results about another subject. But Epstein's analysis did not distinguish between voters' interest levels in different topics.And Srinivasan noted that the study did not take into account how people's voting preferences might have been affected by other technological platforms, such as Facebook, which he said was "quite clearly gamed by third parties" in 2016."You can't zero in on Google and have Google be your only factor in your analysis to shape one's voting outcomes," he said.Srinivasan also said that the political value systems of the people who create search algorithms might affect the results.He said, "Robert and I agree on a lot." But he said Epstein's analysis on search results and voting is overly simplistic.
President Donald Trump spent part of Tuesday morning tweeting about a segment from Fox Business host Lou Dobbs’ show which championed Kevin Cernekee, a former Google engineer who claims he was fired because of the company’s purported anti-conservative bias. “All very illegal,” Trump concluded of the company’s purported actions, adding, “We are watching Google very closely!” This is at least the third time Trump has publicly suggested he would take action against Google based on what he’s seen on Fox.Right-wing media have trumpeted Cernekee’s story over the past few days, with outlets fitting him neatly into their narrative that tech companies have it in for Republicans. But the story is more complicated than that: While it portrays him as a rank-and-file conservative, Cernekee appears to have repeatedly defended white nationalists on internal Google message boards.How Cernekee’s story ended up on the president’s Twitter says a lot about the right-wing media ecosystem, their obsession with finding supposed conservative martyrs of tech companies, and Trump’s reckless consumption and promotion of whatever Fox News happens to put in front of his eyes.The cautionary tale of “Republican engineer” Kevin CernekeeOn Thursday, The Wall Street Journal’s Rob Copeland profiled Cernekee, portraying him as a “Republican engineer” fired from the company for the conservative views he expressed on the company’s internal message boards.“Google told Mr. Cernekee in a termination letter that he was let go for multiple violations of company policies, including improperly downloading company information and misuse of the remote-access software system,” Copeland reported. “Mr. Cernekee, who hasn’t spoken publicly before about his status at Google, denies that. He says he was fired for being an outspoken conservative in famously liberal Silicon Valley.” Copeland largely paraphrased Cernekee’s message board posts or accepted his explanations of them rather than quoting their content. This made it impossible for readers to assess precisely what his views were. But the story’s 28th paragraph provides a tantalizing detail: A fellow conservative engineer “internally circulated a dossier describing Mr. Cernekee as ‘the face of the alt-right’ at Google” (that engineer was also later fired).It remains contested whether Cernekee’s views triggered his termination. But the Journal’s framing of Cernekee as simply a “Republican” with “conservative takes” who stands up for other “right-leaning employees” created the impression that it is open season on anyone to the right of Hillary Clinton. That makes his actual opinions relevant. The Daily Caller, which has its own complicated history with the alt-right, pulled on that thread a few days later (though only after producing multiple stories amplifying Cernekee’s claims). Deputy Editor J. Arthur Bloom reported that Cernekee had “suggested raising money under the auspices of the company’s free speech listserv for a bounty to identify Richard Spencer’s assailant.” After Spencer, one of the nation’s most prominent white nationalists, was punched while giving an interview in January 2017, Cernekee suggested putting together a group donation to support the search for the puncher through racist troll Charles Johnson’s website.Cernekee identified Spencer only as a “well known conservative activist.” When other Google employees pointed out that Spencer is “a prominent, vehement racist and anti-Semite,” Cernekee defended him. The Daily Caller story was subsequently confirmed by BuzzFeed News tech reporter Ryan Mac. Bloom also reported that Cernekee had criticized a media description of the “Golden State Skinheads” as a neo-Nazi group, and he praised the organization for “standing up for free speech and free association.”“Conservatives angry at big tech may view such postings as a cautionary lesson in the importance of vetting their cause célèbres,” Bloom concluded. Indeed.Conservative media made Cernekee a cause célèbreRight-wing media outlets have spent the last several years trumpeting complaints that social media platforms are biased against conservatives. This behavior is consistent with conservatives’ decades-long strategy of decrying the news media as biased against them in order to influence media coverage. But it is inconsistent with the facts.“There is no evidence that Google, Facebook, or any other major tech company is biased against conservative employees or conservative content,” Recode reported in response to Cernekee’s allegations. “While it is true that most tech employees lean liberal in their personal beliefs, that doesn’t mean that their employers discriminate in the workplace, or in the products they build and maintain.”Cernekee’s story echoed the conservative narrative about tech companies' bias, and it rocketed through the right-wing media after Thursday’s Wall Street Journal profile. He was treated as both a conservative martyr and as a credible source for information on Google’s operations.Notably, these aggregations portrayed Cernekee as a typical conservative, with only the Post mentioning that Cernekee had been linked to the “alt-right.”By Friday night, Cernekee was being feted on Tucker Carlson’s Fox News show, a regular home for both deceptive attacks on tech companies and white supremacist talking points. After providing the former engineer the platform to repeat his allegation that he was fired for being a conservative, Carlson turned his attention to Google’s influence on the 2020 election. “Do you believe that Google will attempt to influence the election outcome or will attempt to try to prevent Trump from being reelected?” Carlson asked. “I do believe so. I think that’s a major threat,” he replied. “And yet, Congress, including Republicans are just sitting back and acting like it's not happening,” Carlson responded. “It's disgusting. Kevin, thank you for sounding that alarm.” That appearance launched a new wave of aggregations by conservative media outlets.Fox’s morning show Fox & Friends hosted Cernekee on Monday where he repeated his allegation that Google intends to prevent Trump’s reelection. That interview, in turn, became the basis for a segment on the Monday night edition of Fox Business’ Lou Dobbs Tonight, which aired several hours after the Daily Caller published its story detailing Cernekee's postings. “That is nasty stuff,” the host commented of Cernekee’s allegations, “and by the way, it’s illegal.” He later added that the Justice Department “should be sitting right inside the Google complex” to prevent “a fraud on the American public.” His guest, Breitbart.com’s Peter Schweizer, added that DOJ should be “monitoring what Google is doing in real time now.”Dobbs’ show attracts fewer than 400,000 viewers on average. But Trump is often one of them, and he was apparently watching Monday night. Cernekee’s allegations enter the Trump-Fox feedback loopTrump is obsessed with Fox, watching hours of its programming every day and frequently tweeting about segments that catch his attention. This Trump-Fox feedback loop regularly influences the Trump administration’s policy, personnel, and political strategy. On Monday morning, Trump promised to “honor the sacred memory of those we have lost” during mass shootings in El Paso, TX, and Dayton, OH, by “acting as one people.” That night, he tweeted three clips from Dobbs’ show. Two of the president’s tweets dealt with the program’s discussion of Cernekee’s claim that Google is biased against him. The next morning, after tweeting two quotes from the morning’s edition of Fox & Friends, Trump returned to the issue of Google’s bias. In a tweetstorm, the president contrasted what he said he had been told by Google CEO Sundar Pichai with what he had heard on Dobbs’ show the previous night, including from Cernekee.The Trump-Fox feedback loop is particularly salient in giving the president targets for his ire, and the network’s obsession with tech platform bias has repeatedly resulted in angry Trump tweets. This is at least the third time Trump has responded to Fox segments by tweeting that his administration would take action against Google.In August 2018, in response to a conspiracy-minded Dobbs segment, the president accused Google of illegally “suppressing voices of Conservatives” adding that his administration would address the situation. And last month, Trump tweeted that his administration would review whether Google has committed “treason” after he saw a Fox & Friends news brief in which one of his supporters baselessly floated that claim. Conservatives have a political and financial interest in ginning up claims that the tech platforms are biased against them, and right-wing media eagerly amplify their claims for their own interests. This pattern will continue and such issues that don’t hold up to scrutiny will be thrust into the mainstream discourse because the president of the United States loves to watch Fox News.
On Monday, Planned Parenthood announced that it was withdrawing from the government’s Title X program, which provides healthcare services to low-income women, because the Trump administration had saddled Title X with a “gag rule” interfering with doctors’ relationships with their patients.The step means turning down $60 million in federal funding — the first time Planned Parenthood would go without Title X funds in the government program’s nearly half-century existence. The Trump administration denies that the rule is a “gag rule,” but that’s hard to square with its explicit provisions. The rule prohibits recipients of the funding from referring patients to abortion providers; if they give patients a list of doctors for follow-up treatments, they “cannot indicate those on the list who provide abortion.”Planned Parenthood serves about 1.5 million low-income women under Title X, some of whom live in areas with few or no alternative healthcare providers for women. But the gag rule is merely one of many Trump administration actions and policies that have affected people’s health for the worst. It can be hard to keep all of these initiatives straight or even to remember them all, so we’ve compiled a list of the top 10 — more precisely, the bottom 10 — so the cumulative impact is clearer.This isn’t an exhaustive list, merely a judgment call of the worst 10. It doesn’t include measures aimed at ending anti-discrimination protections for LGBTQ patients, for instance, which are part of a broader attack on LGBTQ rights.Because it’s the most recent, we’ll designate the gag rule as No. 1.No. 2: Asking a court to declare the Affordable Care Act unconstitutional. In June 2018, the administration asserted in federal court that key provisions of the law are unconstitutional and refused to defend it against a legal challenge brought by 20 red states.By throwing its weight behind a legal attack on the ACA that many legal experts consider frivolous and obtuse, Trump raised the stakes in the federal lawsuit brought by Texas and other red states. Its action placed at risk the healthcare of 133 million Americans dependent on the ACA’s individual exchange health plans or its provisions for Medicaid expansion. The case is currently under consideration by a federal appeals court.No. 3: The “public charge” rule. This recently finalized rule requires immigration officials to reject applications from immigrants to enter or stay in the U.S. if they have received — or are judged likely to require — any of several public benefits that are tied to need. These include public health services such as Medicaid. The predictable consequence is to discourage immigrant households from accessing such programs even when they’re legally entitled.As we reported in August 2018, when rumors of the impending rule began circulating, healthcare providers with immigrant clienteles already were seeing a reduction in patients. The director of a clinic in the Latino community of Boyle Heights in Los Angeles told me then that her monthly patient enrollments had fallen by 25% after the public-charge proposal leaked out — on top of a one-third drop after Trump’s election.Leaving aside the basic cruelty and inhumanity of a rule that instills fear in families, less healthcare for immigrants means a decline in the health profile of the entire community, raising costs for public programs and employers, among many others.No. 4: Pulling the plug on teen pregnancy prevention. The writing was on the wall when Trump stocked the Department of Health and Human Services with advocates of abstinence-only sex education and birth control. The result became clear in June and July 2017, when 81 teen pregnancy programs around the country were told that their grants would end within the following year; one program that funded educational outreach by Children’s Hospital Los Angeles, among other institutions, was cut off immediately — just as it was beginning the second year of a five-year plan.In all, more than $200 million in annual funding was ended. The risk is that teen pregnancies, which had been in a long-term decline, would head higher again, especially in communities with shrinking access to education and contraception.The cutoff was the handiwork of a cadre of anti-abortion activists placed into high offices at HHS. One has promoted the claim that abortion increases a woman’s chance of breast cancer and of “serious mental health problems,” which is unsupported by medical science. Another treated anti-pregnancy education as a matter of morals, not empirical data. “As public health experts and policymakers, we must normalize sexual delay more than we normalize teen sex, even with contraception,” she said. But studies consistently show that what reduces teen pregnancies is increased use of contraceptives.No. 5: Work rules for Medicaid. The administration has gone full speed ahead on allowing states to impose work rules on residents enrolling in Medicaid, the program aimed at bringing health coverage to the poor. That’s happening despite clear evidence that the rules are catastrophic for the target population’s health coverage and do nothing to increase employment or produce job opportunities.What happens in states that impose these rules is that thousands of enrollees are thrown off Medicaid, even if they remain eligible. That’s because the rules are hard to administer and seem almost purposefully designed to pare enrollments. That’s been noticed by federal Judge James Boasberg of Washington, D.C., who has overturned programs in Kentucky and Arkansas. Nevertheless, the administration has pushed ahead with approvals for six more states, all part of a concerted assault on Medicaid.No. 6: Promoting short-term health plans. Almost from the inception of his administration, Trump has been clearing the way for the spread of short-term health plans. These are insurance plans that don’t meet ACA standards. They don’t cover all the services required by the ACA for qualifying plans, including pregnancy, mental health services and hospitalization. They reject applicants with preexisting conditions. They can impose lifetime benefit caps and weird restrictions such as refusals to cover hospitalizations that begin on a Friday or Saturday.These plans are cheap because they’re junk. Customers often aren’t aware of their limitations until they try to access benefits. The Obama administration limited them to three-month nonrenewable terms, and some states, including California, have outlawed them entirely. Trump wants to allow them to last a year and be renewable, even though that could siphon healthier customers out of the ACA market, driving up premiums for everyone else — just one more device to sabotage the ACA.No. 7: Appointing the worst healthcare officials. Trump began his tenure by naming former Rep. Tom Price (R-Ga.), a sworn enemy of the Affordable Care Act, to head HHS, the agency responsible for enforcing the law. Price immediately started undercutting the law. Price cut the open enrollment period for plans sold through the federal exchanges, HealthCare.gov, from three months to six weeks, then cut the budget for marketing an outreach — which was needed to inform enrollees of the change — by 90%, claiming through department flacks that previous experience suggested that outreach had “diminishing returns,” an assertion contradicted by hard evidence.Price was ousted in October 2017 for ethical lapses, but just before leaving office, he ordered the health agency’s 10 regional directors not to participate in state-based open enrollment events, an unprecedented withdrawal of federal support. Administration sabotage of the individual insurance market during his term was tied to more than half of the average 36% premium increases sought by insurers in 20 states analyzed by Charles Gaba of ACASignups.net.Price was succeeded by Alex Azar, a former drug company executive and lobbyist who has silently presided over a continuation of Price’s sabotage tactics. He remained mum when Trump filed papers asking the courts to declare the ACA unconstitutional, though he let it be known through pseudonymous friends that he opposed the action. (Why not go public?)The quintessential Azar episode occurred in March, when he even acknowledged to a House committee that he had no evidence that work requirements did any good. In fact, he admitted that his department didn’t even know why 20,000 Arkansans got thrown out of Medicaid. Nor could he produce a single study validating the assertion that imposing work requirements on Medicaid recipients made them healthier or helped them find jobs.“You propose implementing mandatory work requirements for Medicaid beneficiaries not knowing what the impact will be, across every single state. What’s the logic in that?” Azar was asked by Rep. Joseph P. Kennedy III (D-Mass.). Azar didn’t have a cogent answer.No. 8: Deliberately raising ACA premiums for 7.3 million people. In April, the administration issued a final rule for marketplace plans in 2020 that it acknowledged would raise premiums for 7.3 million consumers by cutting their premium subsidies. The administration conceded that the higher premiums would cause 70,000 people to drop marketplace coverage each year. The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities calculated that the change would cost a family of four with income of $80,000 an additional $208 annually.The CBPP observed that the change was not required by the ACA or any other law. “The administration is making an entirely discretionary choice to raise costs for millions of people, just weeks after President Trump justified his latest efforts to repeal the ACA by arguing that it has resulted in premiums and deductibles that are too high.” In its explanation of the rule, the administration said it would move forward even though, in its own words, “all commenters on this topic expressed opposition to or concerns about the proposed change.”No. 9: Eliminating the penalty for violating the ACA’s individual mandate. The bill cutting taxes for corporations and the wealthy that Trump signed in December 2017 included a provision reducing to zero the penalty for violating the ACA’s mandate that everyone carry insurance. The penalty was designed to prompt more young and healthy Americans to carry health insurance, which would keep premiums down for the general population.The zeroing-out had an immediate effect on enrollment. California alone saw a 24% drop in new enrollments for 2019, the first year of the change (by more than 92,000 enrollees), almost entirely because of the penalty’s elimination. “Even robust marketing cannot offset the negative impact of its removal,” the exchange said.No. 10: Allowing more employers to deny their workers coverage for contraception. In November 2018, the administration made final a rule vastly expanding the number of employers who could refuse to offer contraceptive coverage to their workers.“The regulations open the door for any employer or college/university with a student health plan with objections to contraceptive coverage based on religious beliefs to qualify for an exemption, the Kaiser Family Foundation reported. “Any employer, except publicly traded corporations, with moral objections to contraception also qualify for an exemption. Their female employees, dependents, and students will no longer be entitled to coverage for the full range of FDA approved contraceptives at no cost.”The regulatory change was just one of many assaults on women’s reproductive health.
Imagine this set of circumstances when Donald Trump was running for president:The real estate mogul cum president decides he wants to buy the world’s largest island with U.S. funds. He and his son publicize images of what a massive building emblazoned with the Trump name would look like on the undeveloped island. The owner of said island, Denmark, says it’s not selling, and the island’s inhabitants say they have no interest in becoming U.S property. So Trump calls off a high-profile diplomatic meeting — creating a potential diplomatic row with an ally — over the whole thing.It sounds like the stuff of parody — the kind of thing Hillary Clinton or one of Trump’s 2016 GOP primary opponents would have invented out of whole cloth to emphasize the potential ridiculousness of the Trump presidency. (And one of them, Ted Cruz, did in fact once muse about Trump nuking Denmark.)But on Tuesday night, it very much happened.The idea of Trump and the U.S. government purchasing Greenland isn’t quite as ridiculous as it might seem at first blush. As has been noted, the United States pursued just such a deal in the 1940s. It saw Greenland as such a strategic location during the Cold War that it established a base there. Fast-forward to present day, and China, a growing super power in the midst of a trade war with Trump, is also interested in the island. Out of all Trump’s fantastic and ridiculous ideas, this one may not really rank as high as some would like it to.But then Trump takes it into the realm of the ridiculous. On Tuesday night, via Twitter, he postponed a long-planned trip to Denmark. He said that, “based on Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen’s comments, that she would have no interest in discussing the purchase of Greenland, I will be postponing our meeting scheduled in two weeks for another time.”The thing about canceling his long-planned trip to Denmark — the kingdom to which the country of Greenland belongs — is not so much that it’s necessarily some kind of international scandal. But we were told that the purchase of Greenland was not really a big deal. It was supposed to be something of a flight of fancy from Trump — something that was on the table but not pressing.Trump himself said Greenland “would be nice” for the United States from a strategic perspective, but he assured this weekend, “It’s not number one on the burner, I can tell you that.” Trump’s chief economic adviser, Larry Kudlow, said, “I’m just saying the president, who knows a thing or two about buying real estate, wants to take a look.”Apparently more than “take a look”; he’s playing hardball and withholding a high-profile visit.The thing about these situations is that foreign leaders have and always will treat Trump with kid gloves, to the extent they can. The United States is a vital ally throughout the Western world. Even when leaders think Trump is clearly being ridiculous, they’re not going to say so publicly, unless things get really bad. Even despite what’s happened in recent days, Denmark put Trump’s name atop a building in advance of his planned visit, much like he and his son did in that photoshopped image of Greenland.But apparently Denmark’s and Greenland’s leaders went too direct in rebuffing Trump’s desire to pursue the biggest real estate deal of his life — quite literally — and the ego in chief can’t let that one slide. Either that, or he’s just having some fun with very serious issues of international diplomacy.
After a self-proclaimed white nationalist killed a woman by driving his car into counterprotesters at a pro-Confederacy “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville two years ago this month, President Trump struggled with a response.In the immediate aftermath, he condemned “hatred, bigotry and violence on many sides” in the violence that erupted, emphasizing “on many sides” by repeating it. The unsubtle implication was that it takes two to tangle, despite the obvious one-sidedness of the death of Heather Heyer. After a backlash at that equivalence, Trump read a prepared statement condemning racism — only to later declare that there were “very fine people” on both sides of the brawling that day. Those sides being pro-Confederacy/pro-white-nationalism and anti-those-things.At a campaign rally a few days later, Trump put a name to the violent actors battling the racists: antifa.“They show up in the helmets and the black masks, and they’ve got clubs and they’ve got everything,” Trump said in Arizona. “Antifa!” (In an interview in April, Trump told radio host Mark Levin that Charlottesville was “the beginning of antifa,” though anti-fascist activism — the “anti-fa” in antifa — dates back decades.)A month after Charlottesville, Trump positioned antifa explicitly as the counterweight to white-nationalist violence.“I think especially in light of the advent of antifa, if you look at what’s going on there, you know, you have some pretty bad dudes on the other side also,” Trump said. “And essentially that’s what I said. Now because of what’s happened since then, with antifa, you look at, you know, really what’s happened since Charlottesville — a lot of people are saying — in fact a lot of people have actually written, ‘Gee, Trump might have a point.’ ”Notice the formulation of “the other side” — itself a tacit acknowledgment that the white nationalists antifa was fighting allied themselves with Trump’s politics.In recent weeks, Trump has discussed the idea of formally declaring antifa to be a terrorist organization, an action with dubious actual significance and which is hampered by antifa being a loose collective rather than an organization. It’s certainly true that antifa has engaged in violence, but Trump has isolated them as exceptional, hinting that the actions of those claiming affiliation with the movement rise to the level of terrorism.On Wednesday, Trump cut to the chase, stating that antifa is, in fact, a terrorist organization. Responding to a question from NewsMax’s John Gizzi, Trump said that “we’re looking at a lot of different things relative to antifa.”“Antifa in my opinion is a terrorist organization,” Trump said. “You see what they’ve been doing. We’ve had great support on that.”It’s not a coincidence that Trump’s emphasis on antifa has ramped up as of late. After the mass shooting in El Paso this month, Trump tried to equate the suspect there with the alleged perpetrator of a mass shooting in Dayton, Ohio. The shooter in El Paso appears to have posted an anti-immigrant screed online that echoed Trump’s hard-line rhetoric, so Trump told reporters that the Dayton shooter was a “fan of antifa.” The evidence for this is that the alleged shooter’s Twitter account posted tweets supporting the group.“Any group of hate,” Trump told reporters on Aug. 7, “I am — whether it’s white supremacy, whether it’s any other kind of supremacy, whether it’s antifa, whether it’s any group of hate, I am very concerned about it. And I’ll do something about it.”With the exception of a few prepared remarks read from a teleprompter, Trump has never actually spoken out solely against white-nationalist violence. He peppered seemingly off-the-cuff references to antifa into his campaign rallies before the 2018 midterms, part of an effort to cultivate a sense of danger about the future of the country. But Trump has never spontaneously spoken out against white supremacist or racist groups or individuals — even though the Department of Justice detailed a number of examples of deadly violence committed on behalf of those ideologies.Trump reiterated his antifa-as-terrorists line last weekend as the threat of violence hung over Portland, Ore., as antifa prepared to confront a demonstration in that city. Trump didn’t condemn the group antifa was preparing to confront, though: the Proud Boys, a group that the FBI has linked to white-nationalist extremism.The Proud Boys marched in Orlando in June when Trump arrived to hold a campaign rally. A Republican operative told the New York Times’s Trip Gabriel that the Trump campaign “didn’t care” about their presence and were told to “treat it like a coalition they can’t talk about.”The takeaway here is straightforward. Trump emphasizes violent acts undertaken by antifa — which have certainly occurred — as a form of whataboutism. Point to racist violence in Charlottesville, and Trump will point to antifa. Ask Trump if he regrets that an alleged mass murderer in West Texas mirrored the president’s “invasion of immigrants” rhetoric before massacring Hispanics, and Trump will point to some antifa-related tweets by a guy who killed people in Dayton apparently at random.Racists have killed scores of people in the past few years, but it’s the loose collective that is antifa that Trump wants to focus on as a threat. Antifa, after all, is on “the other side.”
President Trump said Wednesday he is no longer looking to cut payroll taxes, pivoting away from an option he’d confirmed was under consideration a day earlier.Hours after taking to Twitter to needle the Federal Reserve and its chairman, Jerome H. Powell, to cut interest rates — a common refrain — Trump told reporters at a White House briefing there was no need to cut payroll taxes.“I’m not looking at a tax cut now,” he said. “We don’t need it. We have a strong economy.”The flip-flop comes amid a larger debate on whether the country is headed toward a recession and, if so, when. Trump has habitually described the economy as “strong,” “terrific” and the “greatest in the history of our country.” But a recent poll found that nearly 3 out of 4 economists believe the United States will tip into recession by 2021, pointing to the U.S.-China trade war and stock market tumult as indicators the economy is shakier than Trump projects.On Tuesday, Trump confirmed he was weighing a temporary payroll tax cut and other measures, seemingly acknowledging that rising fears of a slowdown extended to the Oval Office. In the past, he has praised the strength of the economy while also floating steps that are usually reserved for periods of economic struggle, such as doubling down on the Fed to cut interest rates.Trump’s acknowledgment of the payroll tax plan came one day after The Washington Post reported that several senior White House officials had begun discussing the option. At the time, the White House publicly denied those discussions.In a string of tweets on Wednesday, Trump lashed out at the media for “doing everything possible [to] ‘create’ a U.S. recession, even though the numbers & facts are working totally in the opposite direction.” And while repeating his rallying cry that the economy is strong, Trump again poked fingers at Powell and the Fed, accusing the chairman, a former investment banker, of performing like “a golfer who can’t putt.”“Wake up Federal Reserve,” Trump wrote. “Such growth potential, almost like never before!”Trump followed up shortly after with another tweet asking “WHERE IS THE FEDERAL RESERVE?”Some within the administration have said that if the public were aware of the internal discussions about how to stimulate the economy, it could be a cause for further concern. Still on Tuesday, Trump said he was open to new options, including a potential change to capital gains taxes that would give many investors an additional break.“Payroll tax is something that we think about, and a lot of people would like to see that, and that very much affects the workers of our country,” Trump said Tuesday during an exchange with reporters at the White House.Millions of Americans pay a payroll tax on their earnings, a 6.2 percent levy that is used to finance Social Security programs. The payroll tax was last cut in 2011 and 2012, to 4.2 percent, during the Obama administration as a way to encourage more consumer spending during the most recent economic downturn. But the cut was allowed to reset back up to 6.2 percent in 2013.
Trump’s diplomatic style is one that probably wouldn’t work in any other Western country. He’s constantly throwing his weight around on the world stage, musing about breaking up alliances, demanding huge concessions, and claiming to have won big without evidence. The reason Trump’s method works — or, at least, that it hasn’t yet led to a diplomatic crisis — is because he runs the West’s most influential and powerful country.Foreign leaders have adopted a variety of strategies for dealing with that, generally involving flattery and shrugging off Trump’s impractical and often counterfactual ideas. But Denmark and Greenland’s leaders this weekend didn’t do that; they instead said what they really thought of a Trump plan, and the result is the kind of diplomatic row we all knew might happen one day.Faced with Trump’s imperial idea to purchase the world’s largest island, Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen responded with the kind of disbelief world leaders have been loath to express publicly about Trump.“Greenland is not for sale,” she said, adding: “I strongly hope that this is not meant seriously.”She added that the whole thing was “an absurd discussion” and compared it to a “joke.” “Thankfully, the time where you buy and sell other countries and populations is over,” she said. “Let’s leave it there."In the same interview, Frederiksen was quick to emphasize that the United States is “our most important ally,” but apparently the damage was done.Trump made clear Wednesday that he canceled his trip to Denmark not just because Greenland isn’t for sale but also because he felt as insulted by Frederiksen’s response as she was by his overture.He said her statement “was nasty” — invoking a word he has repeatedly used to describe political women he disagrees with. “It was not a nice way of doing it,” he said. “She could have just said, ‘No, we’d rather not do it.’ ” He added: “They can’t say, ‘How absurd.’ ”Frederiksen could never have actually played along with Trump on this. He made it a political no-brainer: She could either entertain the idea and look like she wasn’t standing up for her country and the country of Greenland, which is part of the Kingdom of Denmark, or reject it flatly and project strength in the face of a superpower that thinks it can just buy its territory. She took the latter approach, erring on the side of strength rather than diplomacy.And that’s unusual. Even as Trump has toyed with breaking up NATO, for instance, and claimed massive concessions from member countries (even though there’s no evidence of this), leaders have put a good face on it. After Trump said the NATO members had met his demand to increase their funding of the alliance, French President Emmanuel Macron said matter-of-factly that this wasn’t part of any agreement, but he didn’t belabor the point.Even as Trump has launched a massive trade war with China that threatens both the U.S. and Chinese economies, Chinese President Xi Jinping has maintained a cordial relationship with Trump, preferring not to add personal insults to an already-volatile mixture.“The Chinese know that Trump is unpredictable and mercurial, and so they will certainly try not to attack him personally — and they haven’t,” Ming Wan, a professor at George Mason University recently told the Atlantic. “The Chinese are obviously mad, but the response has been less pointed and singularly more measured.”Trump’s relationship with German Chancellor Angela Merkel has been somewhat rocky, owing in large part to Trump’s desire to point to her country as an example of what happens with too much immigration. But when Trump floated a bilateral trade deal between the United States and Germany during their meeting in 2017 — even though the European Union expressly forbids such things — Merkel chose her words carefully. Witness this amazing anecdote from the New York Times:Rather than exposing Mr. Trump’s ignorance, Ms. Merkel said the United States could, of course, negotiate a bilateral agreement, but that it would have to be with Germany and the other 27 members of the union because Brussels conducted such negotiations on behalf of its members.“So it could be bilateral?” Mr. Trump asked Ms. Merkel, according to several people in the room. The chancellor nodded.“That’s great,” Mr. Trump replied before turning to his commerce secretary, Wilbur Ross, and telling him, “Wilbur, we’ll negotiate a bilateral trade deal with Europe.”Perhaps the best analog for what we’re seeing between Trump and Denmark is when then-British prime minister Theresa May rebuked Trump for promoting anti-Muslim videos that originated with a fringe British group. Trump’s response was swift:https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/936037588372283392May, like Frederiksen, had little choice. Opposition to Trump’s impending visit was growing in her country, and she needed to respond with more than just platitudes. She and Trump, of course, ironed things out over time. And similarly, on Wednesday, Frederiksen sought to downplay the situation as being far short of a “diplomatic crisis.” It will be interesting to see how she handles it moving forward, though, if Trump continues to push an idea that her country and Greenland both view as insulting.Whatever the end result, the flap has provided a rare instance in which a world leader said exactly what they thought about Trump and his ideas. We shouldn’t expect that to be repeated too often.
Tuesday turned out to be a busy day for President Trump. He poked another U.S. ally in the eye, questioned the loyalty of American Jews, backpedaled on gun legislation and undercut the denials of his advisers on the economy. It was just another normal day in the Trump administration.Take Tuesday’s quartet case collectively, and it portrays an administration and White House in chaos, lacking in systematic policymaking. It portrays a president who changes his mind whenever it suits him, whose statements shift with the moment, and who uses words carelessly and sometimes destructively. It forms a pattern of dissembling, of deliberate or unknowing falsehoods as well as efforts to divide already divided Americans from one another.Adding to the chaos and confusion, the president went at it all again Wednesday with another lengthy press availability. He took back some of what he said Tuesday and reinforced other things, leaving people — no doubt including his own advisers — to wonder what and how he thinks about the issues before him.On Sunday, as he was preparing to return to Washington, Trump was asked about reports that he was interested in having the United States purchase Greenland from Denmark. The president confirmed those reports and said there were strategic reasons to be interested in that kind of a deal. But he played down the idea that this was an urgent issue on his agenda. “It’s not number one on the burner, I can tell you that,” he said.Roll forward 48 hours, when he tweeted that he was scrubbing his upcoming visit to Denmark because Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen had “no interest in discussing the purchase of Greenland.”That caught Carla Sand, the U.S. ambassador to Denmark, by surprise, as she had tweeted earlier in the day: “Denmark is ready for the POTUS … Partner, ally, friend.” By Wednesday morning, she was trying to assure everyone that Trump “values & respects Denmark and looks forward to a visit in the future.”Rufus Gifford, who was ambassador to Denmark under Barack Obama, offered a more caustic view of the decision to cancel the visit. “He is a child,” he said in a tweet.In his conversation with reporters Wednesday, the president indicated that he had canceled the trip because he was upset with the Danish prime minister’s dismissal of the sale of Greenland, calling her reaction “nasty” and adding, “You don’t talk to the United States that way, at least under me.”On Sunday, Larry Kudlow and Peter Navarro, two of the president’s economic advisers, appeared on Sunday talk shows with the message that all was well with the economy, despite unsettling signs in previous days. Kudlow pleaded for optimism about the future. Navarro assured viewers that China is absorbing the full cost of the trade war that has been stalemated for some time.The president buttressed those statements with comments about the strength of the U.S. economy, which many economists say could be slowing down. Trump also said he is prepared for anything. Other administration officials dismissed any cause for concern.On Monday, The Washington Post’s Damian Paletta reported that, with concerns rising about a possible recession, administration officials were discussing options, including a cut in the payroll tax. A White House official publicly denied the report.On Tuesday, in the Oval Office, the president made that denial inoperative, confirming that in fact, administration officials were considering a cut in the payroll tax, along with other possible changes, including in the capital gains tax.“Payroll tax is something that we think about and a lot of people would like to see that,” he said.On Wednesday, he took it back. “I’m not looking at a tax cut now; we don’t need it. We have a strong economy.” Despite the claim of a strong economy, he once again pushed Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell to cut interest rates. “If he does it, you’ll see a rocket ship; you’ll see a boom.”After the horrific shootings in El Paso and Dayton, Ohio, the president made a point of saying he was keenly interested in doing something about guns. He spoke specifically about expanding background checks for firearm purchases, an idea that has overwhelming support among Republicans, independents and Democrats.He had climbed this hill before, after previous mass shootings, only to roll back down, so there was plainly skepticism about whether he would ever follow through, particularly as he had married the idea of background checks with immigration reform. Internally he faced resistance to moving forward on gun legislation.In recent days, his language changed as he indicated that the current background checks were working. On Tuesday, in a telephone call he initiated with Wayne LaPierre, CEO and executive vice president of the National Rifle Association, Trump made clear that those background checks are no longer in his sights. That news was first reported by the Atlantic’s Elaina Plott.On Wednesday, he denied that he had indicated to LaPierre that background checks were no longer on the table. “I have an appetite for background checks,” he said, without explicitly saying what changes he supports or how far he is willing to go to get a bipartisan agreement. But he hedged, suggesting that Democrats could want more than he’s prepared to give.At his Oval Office photo opportunity with Romanian President Klaus Iohannis Tuesday, the president renewed his feud with Reps. Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.) and Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.) over their trip to Israel that was blocked by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government.U.S. support for Israel has long been a bipartisan enterprise, but that bipartisanship has been strained in recent years and those strains have grown as Trump has used his full embrace of Netanyahu to advance both policy and political goals.The controversy over Tlaib and Omar’s visit and their posture toward Israel has taken it to another level, and the president has sought to brand the entire Democratic Party with their criticism and their support for the boycott, divestment and sanctions movement.Most of what he said Tuesday was a repetition of previous comments about the two lawmakers and about two other first-term congresswomen, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) and Ayanna Pressley (D-Mass.).Toward the end, however, he veered into dangerous territory. “Where has the Democratic Party gone?” he said. “Where have they gone where they’re defending these two people over the state of Israel? And I think any Jewish people that vote for a Democrat, I think it shows either a total lack of knowledge or great disloyalty.”Trump allies characterized what he said as a poor choice of words, but those words, whether deliberately chosen or spoken without any sense of historical context, brought quick and strong condemnations as echoing anti-Semitic stereotypes used in the past. Whatever the motivation, they are now words spoken by a president of the United States sitting in the Oval Office.Asked Wednesday what he meant, he left ambiguity. “In my opinion, you vote for a Democrat, you’re being very disloyal to Jewish people,” he said, “and you’re being very disloyal to Israel.”After the past two days, there is only one thing to say: Be braced for Thursday.
President Donald Trump on Wednesday said he is "seriously" considering ending US birthright citizenship despite the fact that such a move would face immediate legal challenge and is at odds with Supreme Court precedent."We're looking at that very seriously, birthright citizenship," Trump told reporters outside the White House, echoing his administration's previous vow to unilaterally end the process by which babies born in the country automatically become citizens.The President did not elaborate on what he meant.Trump's statement came as the administration announced a proposal to detain undocumented families together indefinitely, replacing the agreement that set a 20-day limit for holding children.The 14th Amendment of the Constitution guarantees birthright citizenship and states: "All persons born or naturalized in the United States and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside." The ability of a president to end birthright citizenship has been extensively challenged by a range of lawmakers and legal scholars -- including one of Trump's own judicial nominees.James Ho, a Trump appointee to the 5th US Circuit Court of Appeals who is highly respected in conservative circles, wrote a paper in 2006 noting that such proposals concerning birthright citizenship raise serious constitutional questions due to the clear words in the 14th Amendment."That birthright is protected no less for children of undocumented persons than for descendants of Mayflower passengers," Ho wrote in the paper published before he became a judge.An attempt from the Trump administration to end birthright citizenship would also be challenged by Supreme Court precedent. In 1898 in United States v. Wong Kim Ark the court said that a child born in the US to non citizens parents of Chinese descent was entitled to citizenship at his birth.The case came after Wong Kim Ark, traveled to China for a temporary visit when he was 22 and was denied reentry. And other cases since then have built upon it.Speaking with Axios in 2018, Trump said he would end birthright citizenship through an executive order, though he did not provide a timeline for doing so."We're the only country in the world where a person comes in and has a baby, and the baby is essentially a citizen of the United States for 85 years with all of those benefits," he said. "It's ridiculous. It's ridiculous. And it has to end." In fact, more than 30 countries around the world have birthright citizenship.The comments were met with immediate pushback from lawmakers, including then-House Speaker Paul Ryan, a Wisconsin Republican, who told a Kentucky radio station that "you cannot end birthright citizenship with an executive order."Presidential candidate Kamala Harris, a Democratic senator from California, mocked Trump's comments on Twitter Wednesday, stating the President "should 'seriously' consider reading the Constitution."
The Madness of George III
Trump made at least 11 false claims Wednesday while speaking with reporters for more than half an hour before leaving the White House for a speech and fundraiser in Kentucky.Two of the false claims were about Greenland, which he has unsuccessfully offered to purchase from Denmark. One of them was an abbreviated version of a baseless story about Barack Obama he told three times in 2017.Obama and the PhilippinesTrump said that he will not allow foreign countries to disrespect him or the US. He said that things were different under Obama, who was treated "so badly," and he cited an example: "President Obama: when they wouldn't let him land in the Philippines."Facts First: Obama was never prevented from landing in the Philippines. Rather, Obama called off a planned meeting with President Rodrigo Duterte in 2016 after Duterte delivered a profane and insulting rant about him.Trump could have accurately said that Obama was treated disrespectfully by Duterte, but there is no basis for the suggestion that Duterte stranded Obama in the sky.Greenland and DenmarkOf his rejected proposal to acquire Greenland from Denmark, Trump said, "I think it is a good idea, because Denmark is losing $700 million a year with it. It doesn't do them any good."Facts First: Denmark's annual subsidy to Greenland, an autonomous territory of Denmark, is for less than $600 million.According to a representative from Greenland's Ministry of Finance, Head of Division Anders Fonnesbech-Wulff, the grant for 2019 is expected to amount to 3.86 billion Danish kroner (DKK), which is approximately $573 million. The amount has increased slightly over the years, from $547 million (3.68 billion DKK) in 2016 to $553 million (3.72 billion DKK) in 2017 to $568 million (3.82 billion DKK) in 2018. All US dollar amounts are based on the Tuesday exchange rate.Greenland and TrumanTrump said that President Harry Truman wanted to buy Greenland from Denmark, which is true. But he also said, "President Truman said, 'What about Greenland?' And he talked about it very openly and it was a big deal at the time."Facts First: Truman was not open about his desire to purchase Greenland. As the Washington Post reported, Truman's 1946 offer to Denmark, $100 million in gold, "didn't become public knowledge until 1991, when a Copenhagen newspaper came across declassified documents in the National Archives."The dollar"Yesterday we had the strongest dollar in the history of our country. Yesterday we had the strongest dollar in the history of our country. Now in one way I'm honored by that, but in another way it makes it much harder to export goods, you understand. ... It is much harder to compete. We had literally the strongest dollar in the history of our country," Trump said.Facts First: The dollar is not the strongest it has ever been against other currencies.There are various ways to measure the strength of the dollar. The USDX dollar index, which compares the dollar to a group of other countries' currencies, is hovering around its highest level since 2017 -- but the dollar was stronger at various points in 2015, 2016 and 2017, plus several points in the 1980s and early 2000s. The Bloomberg Dollar Spot Index, which compares the dollar against another group of currencies, is around its highest level of the year, but it too was higher in multiple years past.Trump might perhaps have been confused by the news earlier in the week that Bloomberg's measure had hit a new 2019 peak.Family separation"I am the one that kept the families together. OK? You remember that, right? Just remember I said it. And now it gets even better. President Obama and others brought the families apart. But I'm the one who kept the families together," Trump said.Facts First: Trump did not inherit an Obama policy of routinely separating migrant children from their parents. Separations were rare under Obama. Trump made them standard.It is technically true that Trump ended the separation policy: in June 2018, he signed an executive order to detain families together. But he was ending his own policy, not Obama's, and he only signed the order after a furious public outcry.The trade war"Somebody said, 'It's Trump's trade war.' This isn't my trade war. This is a trade war that should've taken place a long time ago by a lot of other presidents," Trump said.Facts First: This is nonsense. As is obvious, Trump initiated the trade war with China. He defended his decisions in this very exchange with reporters, saying the conflict needed to happen because China has long taken advantage of the United States.Trump is free to argue that other presidents should have launched a trade war, but not to deny that he was the one who did.China"They had the worst year in 27 years, but I think it was actually 52 or 54 years. It was the worst year they've had in half a century," Trump said while talking about China.Facts First: China's official second-quarter GDP growth rate, 6.2%, was the worst since 1992, 27 years ago. There is no basis for the "52 or 54 years" claim.Trump has correctly cited this "27 years" statistic in the past without questioning it. This week, though, he has begun doubling it. He said Tuesday that "China has had the worst year they've had in 27 years" -- then added, "And a lot of people are saying the worst year they've had in 54 years."Experts say China's official statistics are unreliable, but there is no specific evidence for the "half a century" claim. Derek Scissors, an expert on US economic relations with Asia at the conservative American Enterprise Institute think tank, notes that going past 27 years ago skips over the 1989-to-1992 period in which China's growth slowed significantly after its 1989 crackdown on protests in Tiananmen Square.Trump also repeated these false claims he has made on multiple previous occasions:- The trade deficit with China: He said the trade deficit with China has been $500 billion or more for years. (It has never been $500 billion; it was $381 billion last year when counting goods and services, $420 billion when counting goods alone.)- His approval rating: He said he has a 94% approval rating among Republicans and the "highest of any Republican" in "history." (His approval with Republicans is very high, regularly in the 80s and sometimes creeping into the 90s, but it has not been 94% in any recent poll. Trump's Republican approval peak in Gallup polling ranks sixth out of seven post-World War II Republican presidents.)- The border wall: He said "tremendous numbers of miles of wall" and "large sections of wall" are being built on the Mexican border. (No new miles have been built during Trump's presidency, though about 50 miles of replacement barriers had been built as of July, the Washington Examiner reported.)- Mexican troops on the border: He said, "I want to thank Mexico. They have 26,000 soldiers at our border, and they're really stopping people from coming in." (The approximately 26,000 troops are split between the US border and Mexico's southern border. Trump himself said in late July that 6,000 of the troops were near Guatemala.)
Historians studying the Trump presidency will have a prodigious amount of digital material that demands examination but defies explanation. The president’s Aug. 21, half-hour, South Lawn press availability deserves to be at the top of that list.With the whir of a helicopter engine in the background, President Trump veered from topic to topic with utter confidence, alarming ignorance, minimal coherence and relentless duplicity.President Vladimir Putin, he said, “made a living on outsmarting President Obama” — even though it is Trump who now urges a Russian return to the Group of Seven summit without any concessions on Putin’s part.On pursuing the trade war with China, Trump called himself the “chosen one.” This came within hours of tweeting a quote that he is loved like “the second coming of God.” At some point, arrogance is so extreme and delusional that it can only be expressed in blasphemy.Trump accused the Danish prime minister of “blowing off the United States” because she scorned his own balmy, offensive musings on the future of Greenland. “We treat countries with respect,” he said — except, presumably, the “shithole” ones.Trump’s new immigration rule, he claimed, would “do even more” to bring migrant families together — though this togetherness, he failed to mention, would come by allowing the indefinite detention of migrant families.“I am the least racist person ever to serve in office,” said the man who is increasingly bold in his use of racist tropes.He joked again about being in office 10 or 14 years from now — appealing to people who find overturning the constitutional order a laugh riot.“Mental health,” Trump went on. “Very important.” Hard to argue with that one.“Our Second Amendment will remain strong,” Trump promised, while previewing an effort to overturn that portion of the 14th Amendment guaranteeing birthright citizenship. Some parts of the Constitution, clearly, are more constitutional than others.Trump pledged the return of thousands of captured Islamic State fighters to Europe, one way or another. “If Europe doesn’t take them, I’ll have no choice but to release them in the countries from which they came, which is Germany, France and other places.” Did the president of the United States just threaten to release dangerous terrorists on the streets of our closest allies? Evidently.Of the wounded and grieving families Trump visited following recent mass shootings: “The love for me,” he boasted, “and my love for them was unparalleled.” And this was demonstrated by “hundreds and hundreds of people all over the floor.” No one draws a bigger crowd in an intensive care unit.After repeating an anti-Semitic trope about the disloyalty of Jews who vote Democratic, Trump insisted to a reporter, “It’s only anti-Semitic in your head.” But control over the plain meaning of English words is not a presidential power. And the charge of disloyalty is the essence of anti-Semitism.Seldom in presidential history has more nonsense been expressed with greater concision. Never would the interests of the United States have been better served by a louder helicopter.What to make of this? First, the Trump presidency is not just unfolding, it is unraveling. All narcissists believe they are at the center of the universe. But what happens when a narcissist is actually placed at the center of the universe? The “chosen one” happens. Trump is not just arguing for an alternative set of policies; he is asserting an alternative version of reality, in which resistance to his will is disloyalty to the country.Second, the president has systemically removed from his circle anyone who finds this appalling. Every president has the right to advisers who share his basic worldview. But Trump appears, on many topics, to have stopped taking advice altogether. His counselors are now flunkies. The proof of their loyalty is not found in the honesty of their opinions but in the regurgitation of his insanity.Third, the president is increasingly prone to the equation of the national interest with his personal manias. He is perfectly willing to threaten relations with Denmark — or to force the Israeli government into a difficult choice — if it serves his tweeted whims. This approach is more characteristic of personal rule than democratic leadership. Self-worship is inconsistent with true patriotism.Trump’s promotion of moral and political chaos puts other members of his party in a difficult position. Difficult, but not complicated. It is their public duty to say that foolish things are foolish, that insane things are insane, that bigoted things are bigoted. On growing evidence, their failure to do so is abetting the country’s decline into farce.